


Signs of Nonconformity

by QuarticZirconia



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 13:32:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5745706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuarticZirconia/pseuds/QuarticZirconia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her armor is forged, and her spirit purged, in the fires of reconditioning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Signs of Nonconformity

Sweet steam rose in her nostrils as the hot brew poured over her tongue. Bren Tirath winced as foreign spices wormed into a still-bleeding cut on her lip.

She welcomed the pain, clung to it like the last fragment of a catamaran shattered against a coral maze in the seizing oceans of home. Memories of her distant childhood were no murkier than the last five minutes through the enchantment of drugs flooding her veins.

The delicate cup tipped away from her mouth. He wiped dribbles from her chin with a linen napkin, and folded the spots of tea and blood beneath clean white corners. His adoring stare was edged with uncertainty. Excitement. Madness.

The First Order had conscripted Bren at the usual age of three. She remembered that day and a scattershot of others before it. Swimming with her mother. Sailing with her father. She remembered enough to know that she was not stormtrooper LT-347. No matter how many times they sent her for reconditioning.

“You’re making a big mistake,” she said through gritted teeth. Her dislocated shoulder ached like the drums of war. It had been reset minutes before the medi-droids strapped her to the Conditioner’s table. 

Only his favorite droid remained with them now. The custom model had ten-fingered hands at the end of six spindle arms. Each pair sprouted like wings from its torso on rotating belts. Waiting like a posed mannequin, it stood stiffly at the control podium. Its skullcap of yellow light blinked languidly in standby.

The Conditioner smiled at Bren indulgently. He liked for her to be awake just long enough to explain why carving her mind apart neuron by neuron was a good thing.

He pressed a switch on the base of the table to dip her slowly back from 45-degrees. “Do you know why you are my favorite?” When she was horizontal, he turned away. He set the teacup on its saucer with a clink that echoed around her brain like a circling albatross. “You believe you can win.”

Her eyes tracked his stroll around the reconditioning chamber. He set his hand on the droid’s shoulder as if to encourage it for the performance ahead. Its cap light blazed from a few candelas to an indoor sun, illuminating a pantheon of surgical probes and equipment slung from the ceiling.

“You believe you can win. And that strength, sculpted into a better form, will carry you to a place beyond any other Conditioner’s work or dreams. We’ll go there together, you and I. We’ll go to a place unimagined in the most vaunted hallucinations of lesser minds.”

A symphonic machine hum swelled in the room as the droid powered up the surgical rig and began diagnostics. The Conditioner came to her side and swept Bren’s short bangs aside with a slide of cold fingers against her forehead.

“Today I will make from you a soldier greater than the myths of any indigenous faith in the galaxy. More fearsome than any god. More astute than any devil. No other has been strong enough to reach this final session. Today you will be perfect. Or you will die.”

He kissed her forehead with wet lips. The futile strain to squirm away against her restraints shot a lightning jolt of pain from her shoulder. A haggard puff was her only cry.

The Conditioner studied her face up close. His words carried the smell of his spiced tea. “Goodbye, LT-347. My masterpiece. My Phasma.”

The instant he stood back, needles rained into her arms, belly, legs, and neck. They sank a chord of varied drug doses. A flame bloomed in her chest as they crashed together in her heart and shot molten ribbons to her skull.

The oceans of home heaved in her mind. The splinter of hull ripped from her hands, and Bren Tirath sank beneath the waves.


End file.
